Sitting happily reading about how to build pptp support into the debian kernel, to get remote access to the Rising Tide office in Oxford working, and I nearly jump out of my skin…

“Arrrggghhhhhhh!!!!”

As I turned around I realised the unthinkable had happened - at least for anyone with a laptop - Elissa had spilt a large glass of water all over ‘Aerosol’ [1]

The fact that I’m writing this a day and a half later and the laptop is working is, by my reckoning, incredible. I thought I’d just post what happened, and what I did, in case anyone reading this is unfortunate enough to end up in the same situation.

• Pull the power cable out the back, quick.
• Take out the battery.
• Turn it upside down, shake, and watch the rain coming out of the keyboard. (Such a horrible feeling.)
• When the rain has subsided, get out the hairdrier.
• Blow dry from every angle you can think of.
• If you feel competent enough to take apart the case and blow dry inside, it will help. (I did.)
• Put the laptop somewhere warm and dry if you can, but not too hot! Leaving the case apart if you’ve already removed it can’t hurt.
• Wait at least 24 hours.
• Pray, meditate, or whatever spiritual act you feel may help.
• Put the case back together.
• Feel very nervous, and turn the power on.

I was lucky - everything seems to be working, probably in part because of how fast I moved after the spill - I had the laptop unplugged and draining upside down pretty quick! A power-surge to the hard drive could have been a real nightmare. (I have a load of photos on there that aren’t yet backed up.)

[1] Aerosol has been the name of my laptop - a vaio fx250k - since I studied abroad at University of Toronto for a year and did a research project in an atmospheric chemistry research lab. All the computers were named after atmospheric features - stratus, cumulus, that kind of thing.

Update: Lawrence’s poor ibook has just just suffered a similar fate. Lemonade — ouch! But will it recover? Apple vs. Sony, OSX vs Debian, we shall see.